Corruption of Blood

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Karp reached the Dirksen Senate Office Building six streets away without being gunned down by Cuban paramilitaries or Texas fascists, nor succumbing to the more likely ambuscade from one of the dozens of Kennedy-assassination nuts that had started to haunt the Select Committee’s staff.

  The interview with Senator Schaller did not go quite as Ziller had predicted. Schaller proved to be a bluff, square-faced, stocky man with thinning reddish hair, who presented himself in the antique Trumanesque style that had been abandoned by many of his colleagues for the blow dryer and the spin doctor. He had the papers right on his desk and made no bones about what they were. He regretted not having used them himself, cursed the CIA in earthy barnyard terms, and wished Karp good luck. The whole thing took eight minutes, and involved a crushing handshake that seemed to last nearly a third of the entire interview.

  Karp walked back to the Annex at a good clip, making one detour at Third Street to avoid the guy with the funny orange hair who had counted thirty-eight shots in Dealey Plaza. His first stop was the Xerox room, where he made a copy of the Schaller papers. His next stop was Fulton’s office.

  Karp handed the thin stack of originals to the detective and sat down in a creaky wooden swivel chair to read the copy. For the next twenty minutes there was silence but for the rustle of pages and the creak of Karp’s old chair as both men read. Karp finished his reading before Fulton did and, taking out a pen, began to reread, making notes.

  Fulton indicated he was done reading by scooping up the pile of pages on his desk and neatly squaring the edges of the stack. He placed the documents in the center of his steel desk and looked at them with an odd expression. Karp studied his friend’s face curiously. Was it fear he observed? Unlikely. Clay Fulton possessed more physical courage than any man Karp had ever met. Disgust? Maybe. Karp was fairly disgusted himself.

  He asked, “What do you think, Clay?”

  Fulton met his eyes, his expression one of the most profound bafflement. “What do I think? I think we should’ve stayed in town. We’re way over our heads here, boy. Way, way, way over our heads.”

  In a small whitewashed room in Quetzaltenango in Guatemala, a thin, bearded man packed his suitcase. The phone call from Washington had been unexpected but not disturbing. The man was used to phone calls interrupting his life and asking him to travel to another part of the world to do odd things.

  This is what he does for a living, goes places and does things in response to phone calls. He is not exactly a professional assassin. There may, in fact, be no such thing, despite the fantasies of fiction writers, and were there to be such a profession, it would not be staffed by elegant men who wear dinner clothes and drink champagne in tony resorts. This is simple economics: it is so easy to kill people, and there are so many who will gladly do it cheaply, that it would be hard to command a high living from that trade. The thin man has, however, killed any number of people for money, but only as an ancillary, if critical, activity, just as a chauffeur may wash a car, or a waiter may wipe down a table.

  He is not exactly a spy either, or a mercenary soldier, although he has spied and fought for gold. He has also run a bar in Honduras and managed a small air-shipping service. Essentially, he does what certain people tell him to do. It is the only fixed point in his life, and it gives him the closest feeling he ever has to a feeling of security.

  He completed his packing, put on a khaki baseball hat, turned to leave the room, but stopped at a cracked mirror tacked up by the door and looked at his face. He was nearly forty. He had brown eyes and crisp, short brown hair. He did not think that anyone will recognize his face at his destination. He had aged and grown a beard and it had been a long time.

  The thin man walked down a narrow flight of stairs and entered a room with several desks and chairs in it. A brown-skinned soldier in green fatigues sat in one of them, tilted back against the wall, reading a magazine, his rifle leaning against the wall next to him.

  The thin man asked, “Has Chavez gone out to the airstrip yet?” His Spanish was quite good, almost unaccented.

  The soldier said, “No, the truck’s still outside.” He took in the suitcase. “Going somewhere?”

  “Yes. I have to meet a plane.”

  “What should I tell them?”

  “Tell them I’ll be back, but I’m not sure when,” the thin man said, and walked into the steamy evening.

  SIX

  Five in the morning and Marlene Ciampi lay sleepless on her back, studying the stamped tin pattern of the loft’s ceiling. She was dying for a cigarette, but she had decided to ration herself to five per day, and the first one was going to be with coffee in a few hours, when she officially rose to start the day.

  Much of her energy recently had been going into this sort of self-torment. She had become obsessive not only about smoking, but about food and booze and schedules and shopping. She thought about this, lying in bed. I’m counting everything, she thought. People are starting to look at me funny. I bought a Day-Timer in a little leather case. That’s a joke. I never seemed to need one before; now I write down everything, schedule everything to the quarter hour. I’m not like this, she thought: happy-go-lucky, anything-on-a-dare Marlene. It’s like I’m back in high school with the nuns.

  During such musings, Marlene did not dwell on the source of these disturbing changes. She did not want to believe that Karp’s leaving for Washington was involved at all. She loved Karp, although she was angry with him for leaving, but that didn’t mean she was dependent on him. Dependency was the death of love, so Marlene believed, and she also knew that she should be able to do it all on her own. She had been on her own for a long time before she got together with Karp, so what was the problem now? The kid was no problem; Lucy was an angel—healthy, cooperative, a delight.

  And, of course, other women did it, including black single working mothers with many fewer resources than she had; also, there were those women you read about in the magazines, “Sharon Perfect, single mom, thirty-five, cooks French cuisine for her three kids, vice-president of a major ad agency, plays cello in the local orchestra, training for the Hawaii Triathlon … (picture) Sharon’s a size five, blond, the three kids are gorgeous, snapped at the family table as they discuss nuclear physics in Chinese.”

  With these thoughts stoking her already red-hot guilt and urging her to improve each shining hour with ever more zeal and efficiency, Marlene flung herself from bed, made a hasty ablution, and started her exercise regimen. This was an hour each day of the sort of conditioning that prizefighters use to prepare them for their literally punishing sport. Marlene’s father had been a likely welterweight just after the second war and had worked his way up to a match with Kid Gavilan, and lasted one and thirty of the first round, which was why he had decided to become a plumber. He had, however, taught all of his six kids (including the three girls) how to box.

  Marlene was the only one who had kept it up. She had a body bag and a speed bag set up in a corner of the loft she and Karp called the gym, and now she slipped into shorts and a T-shirt and sneakers and speed gloves, and pounded away at both bags for forty-five minutes. Then she skipped rope with all the hand-crossing, pace-changing frills you see in boxing movies, tossing her head to snap the sweat out of her eyes.

  She stripped and plunged into the huge black tub. She felt better, as she always did after her violent exertions. There was nothing in fact wrong with her or her life, she decided, only with her thinking. She’d stick it out for as long as that idiot wanted to waste his time in Washington. She would flourish, in fact.

  Actually, she reflected as she lolled in the steaming water, things were getting better. Bloom was paying attention to her, he had invited her to a meeting of a national advisory committee on sex crimes. And deservedly: she had racked up some nice convictions, her staff was terrific and getting better, she had earned some nice ink recently. A disloyal thought … maybe Karp’s intransigence had been screwing up her career?

  She left the bath and dried
herself and washed her empty eye socket with saline and inserted the glassie, then walked naked to the closet area under the sleeping loft. There was a full-length mirror there and she stopped to look at herself appraisingly. Nice boobs, smallish but high yet, and well proportioned, nipples the color of Bing cherry jam. She lifted her breasts with both hands and let them drop, checking the jiggle factor. Acceptable. She turned sideways and struck a bodybuilder pose. Some good def on the biceps and triceps, belly still flat, although the washboard ridges she had boasted at seventeen were nearly gone, butt still high and solid. She turned face-to again and slumped, letting her arms hang down like an ape’s. A little thickening in the waist maybe, incipient love handles. Tough shit, thirty wasn’t twenty, but she was still a five and many couldn’t say that. She struck a sex goddess pose and hip-twitched toward the mirror, making the sort of masturbatory breast- and crotch-rubbing motions beloved of soft-core pornographers. Hmm, better stop that; she was horny enough as it was, another reason to be irritated with the absent Karp. She must be sending out pheromones, too. Guys had started to hit on her with a regularity and intensity unusual since her mating. It was irritating and nice at the same time. The image of an affair formed itself in her animal brain and swiftly faded.

  She pushed her face up against the mirror, examining it for blemishes and wrinkles. No, that was still okay; one thing, the Ciampi women had good skin. They ran to fat, but they had good skin. Her mother at fifty-seven looked under forty. Marlene herself still got carded in dark bars.

  She made faces, seeking the traces of wrinkles to come. She curled her lip back and pulled her ears out, chimp fashion. Soon she was cavorting in front of the mirror, grunting and dangling her knuckles against the floor, waggling buttocks, and singing “Alley Oop.”

  “What’re you doing, Mommy?” said her daughter, appearing from behind, her voice tinged with alarm.

  Karp said, “You’re going to have to get this started, guys. I have to get back to the city this weekend. In fact, I’m thinking of splitting early today.”

  The three of them, Karp, Fulton, and V.T., were sitting in Karp’s office going over the documents from Schaller and trying to figure out what to do about them. Clay Fulton gave Karp a concerned look and asked, “Something wrong back home?”

  Karp shrugged. “No. Maybe. Marlene’s been sounding strange on the phone this last week.”

  “Marlene is strange,” said V.T. “You just want to get laid while we do all the work.”

  “That too,” said Karp. “Okay, where are we on this abortion? V.T.?”

  Newbury adjusted his gold-rimmed half-glasses, the ones that he said made him look like a foreclosing banker, and consulted a sheaf of notes. “We have five documents, which we have labeled A through E. I know you’ve read them all, but I want to summarize them so we can all agree on what they say and what’s significant in them. Document A appears to be an internal CIA report from the winter of 1962 describing the composition and capabilities of a Cuban émigré group called Brigada Sixty-one and its involvement in Operation Mongoose—where do they get these names?—which was designed to launch guerrilla raids on Cuban targets and which included a plot to kill Fidel Castro. The burden of the report is that even though President Kennedy had ordered the end of such attempts as part of the Cuban missile crisis deal with the Soviets, Brigada Sixty-one, with the help of the CIA, or some parts of it, had continued to try to infiltrate Cuba and do the regime some damage. The key section for our purposes is a list of CIA contract agents working with Brigada Sixty-one, among whom we find the name ‘Lee Henry Oswald.’ Also mentioned in this report is the name of the project’s CIA handler, somebody named Maurice Bishop, and the name of a Cuban banker named Antonio Veroa. Veroa apparently was the leader of Brigada Sixty-one.

  “Document B appears to be an after-action report, to this same Bishop, in which an actual attempt on Castro’s life by Veroa and a gentleman named Guido Mosca, with some others, is described. This was in 1961. Apparently Mr. Veroa was able to rent, in his mother-in-law’s name, an apartment in Havana overlooking a plaza where Castro was scheduled to give a speech, and was able to install Mosca and the others there with a hunting rifle, a machine gun, and a rocket launcher. The attempt failed, obviously, for reasons that are not covered in the text. It just says that Veroa decided that it had to be called off. Both Veroa and Mosca returned to the U.S. via Mexico. I called Ray Guma about Mosca. Goom says he’s known as Jerry Legs, and was at that time an enforcer for a loan-sharking and gambling operation run by Carlos Marcello in New Orleans.”

  Karp nodded. Ray Guma was the homicide bureau’s resident expert on the world of organized crime, or at least its Italian provinces. “Where is Mosca now? The city? Miami?”

  “Guma said he’ll check and get back to us.”

  V.T. continued, “Documents C and D are two-page memoranda on CIA letterhead. C is dated November 30, 1963, from Richard Helms to a group of CIA senior staff, directing them, in so many words, to stonewall the Warren Commission about any connection between Oswald and the Cubans working for the CIA and about any connection between anyone that turns up in the assassination investigation and Mongoose or any later CIA operations against Cuba. D is dated June 12, 1968, from Clyde Peterson, who was a special assistant in the office of the director of Central Intelligence at the time, to a group of senior CIA personnel, directing them to harass certain witnesses being called by Jim Garrison for the Clay Shaw trial.

  “The last one, E, is my favorite. This is a transcription of an interview conducted by one of Schaller’s investigators. The subject is Milton Thornby, one of Earl Warren’s law clerks. There are two interesting sections. According to Thornby, during an early meeting of the full commission, Allen Dulles informed Warren that he had evidence that Oswald was a Soviet agent, and that if this got out, the American people would demand a retaliation that would certainly lead to a thermonuclear exchange. The other item is a report of a colloquy between old Earl and some of the senior commission staff. The staffer was objecting to taking at face value the CIA’s assurance that Oswald had no intelligence connections. Were they justified in ruling out a conspiracy so early in the investigation? Warren replied with heat that there was to be no investigation in that area and that, quote, ‘Our purpose is to assure the American people that the president was killed by a single man acting alone.’”

  Newbury removed his glasses and rubbed his face. “So. What do we have? Evidence of a conspiracy? No, not quite. Evidence of an interest on the part of the CIA to suppress a thorough investigation? I guess. The question is, why?”

  He looked at the others so they would know that this was not merely rhetorical. After a moment, Fulton said, “I hate this, but okay: because the CIA set up the hit on Kennedy.”

  “Okay, that’s one,” said Newbury.

  Fulton said, “Or they didn’t have anything to do with it, but Oswald worked for them or associated with some people who worked for them and they didn’t want the trail to lead back to their door.”

  “Good. Two. Butch?”

  Karp snapped back to the business at hand. He had been thinking about Marlene and the last phone conversation they had shared, about false laughter and long silences with the dead line whispering bad things to his imagination. He said, “Three, they had nothing to do with Kennedy’s murder, and they didn’t even know Oswald was connected with them, but the trail from Oswald led back to the Cuban involvement, and Mongoose, and using mafiosi, and the stuff they did after Mongoose, after JFK told them to stop. They couldn’t let anyone follow on that trail.”

  “Why not?” asked Fulton. “That stuff got out anyway. And who the hell cares about some spooks playing war games. Especially as they totally screwed up the hit on Fidel.”

  “That might be just the point,” said Karp. “I have a feeling these guys felt they had a reputation to protect. Also, the Warren Report critics who say the whole thing in Dallas was totally organized and carried out by the CIA never explain how come these
guys tried to kill Castro about a dozen times and tripped all over themselves and then got Kennedy the first time out. On the other hand—”

  V.T. broke in. “Stop! Now we’re doing it. This is how people go crazy over this business. Look, there are ten thousand facts, or quasi facts, that have been dug up about this assassination. They’ve been arranged in about four hundred books and God knows how many articles, of which every one contradicts every other one, because each one selects out a group of facts and ignores others that are inconvenient to its initial thesis: the CIA did it, the Mob did it, Castro did it, and so on, of which the Warren Report itself is the most famous example. If we start doing the same thing we’re going to wind up with something that’s not much better than Warren in some different direction.”

  He took off his spectacles again, wiping them absent-mindedly on his tie. The two other men exchanged a look, and Karp asked, “So what do we do, V.T.? Hang it up and go home?”

  V.T. grinned. “Don’t ask me twice. No, I can think of two things. One is this stuff.” He tapped the sheaf of documents. “It’s new and it’s a break. It’s the very first documentary evidence that someone called Lee Oswald was actually connected with the CIA, actually on somebody’s payroll. So we have to explore the CIA connection for all it’s worth. We have to find these three guys, Veroa, Mosca, and their CIA contact, Maurice Bishop. Or whoever Bishop really is.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Fulton. “It’s an alias?”

  “Yeah, I checked already. Nobody named Maurice Bishop ever worked for the CIA. Okay, that’s the first thing. The second approach is through Oswald himself.”

  “How do you mean?” Karp asked. “I thought he was dead. Or am I still being a dupe of the Warren Report?”

  They all laughed, a relief of tension. V.T. said, “That, or a conscious tool of malign forces. No, what I mean is this. Oswald is the sole connector that links all the usual suspects, even if he was just a patsy, as he himself said when they grabbed him that day. Who are the usual suspects? CIA, commies, anticommies, Mob. Okay, Mob first. Oswald was raised by a minor Mob figure in New Orleans, his uncle, Dutz Murret. Murret’s best buddy was Carlos Marcello’s bodyguard and chauffeur. There’s all kinds of hearsay evidence that Oswald knew Jack Ruby before, so maybe he kept his connections up with the wise guys.